Some thought has been paid historically to the problem of how texts or language mediate alignment of meaning across minds. The dependence on participant understanding was recognized in classical rhetoric by such concerns as the nature and role of enthymemes, the character and disposition of audiences, figures of thought, and the psychological underpinnings of arrangement. Persuasion, as a movement of the mind, was seen as dependent on individual sense-making even though this dependency isn’t always made explicit for analytic scrutiny, as rhetoric remained largely focused on the rhetor’s strategy embodied in the text. Rhetoric’s attitude toward sense making is shaped by rhetoric’s origins in oral performance, which leaves no artifact (except for the occasional script or transcription that Plato has so much fun with in the Phaedrus). Oral rhetorical performance confronts rhetors with embodied audiences whose minds they have to move, and confronts audiences with embodied rhetors who appear to be thinking about one thing and then a moment later thinking about something else. The fleeting meaning held in the rhetor’s mind communicated to the audience transfigures and unites them momentarily, to be soon dissipated as thought and attention turn elsewhere. Such is the flow of life noted by the sophists.
The earliest principled attempts to develop a literate rhetoric in the medieval
ars dictaminis (Murphy, 1971), to provide guidance for correspondence within
the church bureaucracy, carry that same concern for socially located sense- making, even though transmitted over distances of space and time. The ars
dictaminis advise embedding the communication within social hierarchies and
situations so that requests appear within well-defined social circumstances and relations, maximizing the reader’s favorable sense-making orientation toward the letter and the letter writer. Proper modes of address invoke and respect institutional role hierarchies and evoke socially shaped benevolence. Other tactics strengthen the benevolence of the relationship, the good will of the receiver, and the respect granted to the reader, to make a favorable reading more likely. Further, narration serves to establish the situation—building an interpretive frame by placing writer and receiver within social positions and events that construct sense-making standpoints. Finally, arrangement is presented as psychologically motivated, modified to fit the particulars of the letter situation (Bazerman, 1999b ; Perelman, 1991).
Eighteenth-century rhetorics, aimed at facilitating participation in newly powerful print culture, are very much concerned with the problem of how the writer can use description to evoke sympathetic sense-making by the reader.
A Theory of Literate Action
Adam Smith, for example, caught up in the psychological conundrums posed by Locke, Hume, and Berkeley, sees sympathy at the heart of community, communication, and ethics (Bazerman, 1993b). Similarly, Joseph Priestley sees the force of description in sharing the experiences and perceptions of humankind so as to transcend the limitations and idiosyncrasies of individual souls (Bazerman, 1991). This mid-eighteenth-century concern for evoking understanding through sympathetic reconstruction, however, led to belleslettrism, as literature became the mechanism by which we were to understand each other’s perspective and develop our sympathetic sense-making imagination. The turn to the literary text combined with romantic notions of genius was accompanied by an increasing trust in the words of the artist, which were taken to be meaningful and out of time, space, and social transaction. This trust in the word of the artist reinforced belief in meaning residing in the text. Much of literary criticism and literary education from the mid-nineteenth through most of the twentieth centuries, can be understood as attempts to increase the ability to appreciate what the text offers. This attention to texts culminates in the new criticism, which was originally motivated to improve student attention to texts (Richards, 1924, 1929). New criticism offered a way to unpack high degrees of textual subtlety (Brooks, 1947), but also led to an awareness of the ambiguities of texts (Empson. 1947) and ultimately to the gaps in meaning and reasoning of texts (Derrida, 1981). The reliance on the text also led to an explicit rejection by some of authorial intent (Wimsatt & Beardsley, 1946) and readers’ emotions (Wimsatt & Beardsley 1949). Reader- response theories, deconstruction, and a return to historicism were reactions in literary studies against the over-reliance on an abstracted text and its limitations in conveying meaning, but this has left literary studies with a scandal of indeterminacy of textual meaning, undermining the stability of the interpretive project and its allied vision of social order through cultivation of the individual’s sensibilities.
Through the mid-twentieth century, the cultural trust invested in the imaginative literary experience to be found in the literary text as re-performed by the expert reader carried the implication that all texts that did not embody or evoke forms of literary imagination were less interesting, hardly requiring sense-making, and certainly not expert sense-making. Non-literary texts were considered transparent in their meanings, requiring little interpretation, imagination, or educated sensibility. Even the higher reaches of non-literary or non-humanistic disciplinary literate practices were largely treated as unimaginative. There was a minor tradition of practitioners of high prestige professional fields asserting the special imaginations of their professions—the
Chapter 9 Utterances and Their Meanings
legal imagination, the sociological imagination, the scientific imagination, the technological imagination, the mathematical imagination. But this always has been presented as something of a surprise and an argument for recognition of the extension of imagination in these unexpected places. We rarely hear of the dentist’s imagination, the accountant’s imagination, the bureaucrat’s imagination, or the merchandiser’s imagination—except perhaps as a joke or a criticism of bourgeois life.